Emma @ 1 years old. This last weekend we headed off to Modjadji – home of the Rain Queen. This is in the old Venda homeland up near Pietersburg, Tzaneen, Haenerstburg area. We packed up lily with emma, Keith and Zan and headed off pretty early as we had to wear the engine in (1000km before Namibia) which meant lots of slow traveling. We clocked the km’s and figured out the GPS power supply issues, listened to the rattles and clanks and debated their priorities in the well being of the car. M had the hard task of bouncing over the seats and playing with Keith and Zan and me. luckily for us the only excitement on the trip down was that M threw up on Zan about an hour from our final destination – boy did she handle it like a star, ensuring that she was M’s best for the weekend. Thanks Zan!

We arrived at the beautiful Venda chalets at about 2.30pm after only one wrong road! It did not take me long to discover the lack of bedding, Vaughn had neglected to tell me that we needed to take bedding so I had carefully left it all at home to try out the new economical packing theory. A few frantic calls to Riaan and Tahiti who had left later than us and we had some bedding organised, thank goodness for PEP stores AGAIN! the camp was really beautiful, surrounded by cycads, patterned dung floors, a great kitchen and bathroom and a decided lack of water. The pump had broken the week we were coming down – luckily we did have extra water in our new water tank! It did not take long for Keith and Zan (our resident bug experts) to show M an intriguing collection of bugs. She was fascinated and spent the weekend dragging one or the other off to check out some millipede (shongalolo), worm, ant, spider, or general bug no matter what the time or day.

She also had a really great time eating dung and smearing her food on the floor and eating the dung encrusted inventions. She also discovered naartjies and many hours were spent eating and peeling naartjies with Zan on the crayon decorated stoep. Otherwise she was really good except for a really frustrating day when she refused to sleep the whole day and as a result was super grumpy with everyone and insisted on irritating Andre (4 months – Riaan and Tahiti’s baby) the whole day. When she was not grumpy she spent a lot of time getting grubby in the fire, chatting up a bomb (bugs, ice, more, I want some too, yabber yabber) and trying to hold Andre’s hand and put him on her lap and carry him around.

We took M on a walk through the cycad forests which she enjoyed until doing a roly poly down the steps, she chased chickens in the local village, talked to the cows in moo language and ate a transvaal fig with a worm in it and nearly got bitten by a brak as part of her cultural growth this weekend.

Soon we were packing up and heading home to warm beds and hot baths! A great weekend on the Ivory trail.